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José Díaz | |
|---|---|
 | |
| General Secretary of the Communist Party of Spain | |
| In office 1932–1942 | |
| Preceded by | José Bullejos |
| Succeeded by | Dolores Ibárruri |
| Personal details | |
| Born | José Díaz Ramos (1895-05-03)3 May 1895 |
| Died | 19 March 1942(1942-03-19) (aged 46) |
| Party | PCE |
José Díaz Ramos (3 May 1895[1] – 19 March 1942) was a Spanishtrade unionist andcommunist politician. He was the General Secretary of theCommunist Party of Spain during theSpanish Civil War.
Born inSevilla and a baker by trade since age eleven, at 18 joined La Aurora, the Union of Seville bakers, who soon after joined the anarchistConfederación Nacional del Trabajo. He became known as the leader of astrike in 1917 and in 1920 participated in the general strike called by the leadership of the CNT, which ended in failure. After the start ofMiguel Primo de Rivera's dictatorship, Díaz continued his labor activism in clandestinity being arrested in Madrid in 1925. In 1927, already out of jail, he joined theCommunist Party of Spain (PCE) with much of the leaders of Seville anarchism. He was able to attract the more radical workers, who were disenchanted with the traditional unions, as well as helping the PCE profit from rivalry between thesocialistUnión General de Trabajadores and theanarchistConfederación Nacional del Trabajo.
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In 1932 the Spanish Communist Party made a major change in direction when it abandoned the Comintern slogan "Workers' and Peasants' Government" and adopted "Defense of the Republic".Díaz was among the new leaders of the party who succeededJosé Bullejos.The others wereVicente Uribe,Antonio Mije,Juan Astigarrabía andJesús Hernández Tomás.[2]The 4th PCE Congress in Sevilla (March 1932) elected him a member of theCentral Committee; in September of the same year, he joined thePolitburo, and soon after was appointedgeneral secretary. In this capacity, Díaz was replacingJosé Bullejos, who had been expelled for opposing the officialparty line during a "campaign of Bolshevisation" that enforcedStalinism as the officialMarxism-Leninism. In 1935, he andDolores Ibárruri led the PCE delegation to the 7thComintern Congress, whereGeorgi Dimitrov introduced the politic of "united front againstFascism", which signaled world communists to seek an alliance with movements previously consideredbourgeois.
With PCE participation in theSpanish Popular Front government and theCivil War, Díaz dedicated himself to inner party politics, without occupying official positions in the administration of theSecond Spanish Republic. His focus was on contributing to the military victory of the Republican forces overFrancisco Franco's troops, and was a noted critic ofJuan Domingo Astigarrabia and hisCommunist Party of Euskadi (the PCE wing in theBasque Country), whom he saw as too sympathetic toBasque nationalism. His sister Carmen Díaz and the mother of his daughter, Teresa Santos, were killed in Seville at the orders of GeneralGonzalo Queipo de Llano, in the early days of the war.
Diaz's health deteriorated due tostomach cancer, and he left Spain for theSoviet Union in November 1938, being operated on inLeningrad. He remained inMoscow after the Republican defeat and the start ofWorld War II, being active as acadre in the Comintern Secretariat (an overseer of communists in Spain,South America, andBritish India). Díaz also wrote an essay containingself-criticism, one prompted by the ideological demands of theGreat Purge and Stalin'spersonality cult, entitledLas enseñanzas de Stalin, guía luminoso para los comunistas españoles ("The Teachings of Stalin, a Luminous Guide for the Spanish Communists"). The articles he wrote in the period were collected asTres años de lucha ("Three Years of Combat").
When theGerman forcesinvaded the Soviet state in June 1941, José Díaz was forced to take refuge inPushkin. In autumn, he settled inTbilisi (Georgian SSR) but his ailment and the immense pain caused him to take his own life that spring. The circumstances of his death have been disputed ever since, with many believing that he had actually been murdered on Stalin's orders. Notably, the stance Díaz had taken in 1939, when he asked for the PCE to be given full control over the Republican government, went clearly (albeit perhaps unwittingly) against the Stalinist strategy.
TheKGB file concerning him wasdeclassified in the 1990s (after thefall of the Soviet Union): it failed to provide any evidence incriminating Stalin's government. Díaz was replaced as general secretary byDolores Ibárruri.
José Díaz was initially buried in Tbilisi's Vera Cemetery, where a tomb monument authored by the Georgian sculptor Moris Talakvadze was installed. The statue disappeared in the early 1990s and only a tombstone has survived. In April 2005, José Díaz's remains were reburied in Seville, and the PCE honored his memory with a ceremonial; the city'sAyuntamiento unanimously voted to designate himHijo predilecto ("Favorite son").[3]
His surname became a popular given name in the USSR.
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| Preceded by | General Secretary of theCommunist Party of Spain 1932–1942 | Succeeded by |
